In conjunction with its mid-career survey of the artwork of Laura Owens, New York’s Whitney Museum has released a series of iMessage stickers designed by Owens herself. The stickers are photographic reproductions of sculptures that the artist produced based on some of the most popular Apple emojis. Carved by hand and rendered in three-dimensions before being digitized, the…

The Miami installation of the travelling Museum of Ice Cream exhibition is facing some steep fines after being found guilty of contaminating local waters with (what else?) candy sprinkles. Local authorities have charged the institution with $5,000 in fines for contaminating the waters and endangering local marine wildlife. The so-called Sprinkle Plague originates from a pool of…

Beloved ceramicist Betty Woodman passed away on Wednesday at the age of 87. Woodman was born in Connecticut and began working with ceramic as an art medium at the age of 16. Early in her career, the artist worked professionally as a ceramicist, creating functional objects, but after travelling to Italy in the early 50’s, Woodman started experimenting with the aesthetic possibilities of the…

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is searching for information regarding a 1990 art heist in which thieves made off with 13 artworks by the likes of Vermeer, Dega, and Rembrandt. The trail of the artworks has been cold for nearly three decades, and the theft remains the largest unsolved art heist in recorded history, with the value of the works totalling around…

China has lifted its ban on South Korean art after nearly a year. The ban, which included not only visual art but other cultural exports like Korean music and television, was originally put in place by China after South Korea installed a series of U.S. air defense systems in Seongju, just south of the capital, Seoul. The defense systems were installed in response to the increased missile threat…

Time Magazine’s person, or in this case, people of the year are the “silence breakers”: (mostly) women who have come forward about sexual assault. The timely article in the magazine’s hotly anticipated annual issue delves into difficult but very pertinent themes -- most of the individuals represented photographically are celebrities in their own right, and even they have had…

A New York Times reporter visited the architectural marvel that is the Louvre Abu Dhabi, describing the space as perhaps looking like an “unfinished space ship.” Surprisingly, the site is not officially a Louvre property -- it’s simply leasing the use of the name for the next 30 years. But what about the art? Currently, the museum houses about 600 objects, most of which are on loan from a…

A grave, discovered in Croatia and belonging to Wally Neuzil, the one-time muse of famed illustrator Egon Schiele, is set to become a monument. Walburga “Wally” Neuzil modeled for numerous works by Schiele after meeting the artist in 1911, when she was 17 and he was 21. and is often called the “Mona Lisa of Austria.” In 1915, Schiele ended his relationship with Wally, who…

The art world is rife with excited chatter today following a record-breaking auction sale of a Leonardo Da Vinci painting from Christie’s in New York. The painting, an oil portrait of Jesus Christ dating back to the 16th century, is the last Da Vinci work in private ownership and sold for a bid of $400 million USD, plus around $50 million in additional fees. After a tense 19-minute bidding…

A dead grasshopper was found embedded in a layer of paint in a work by Vincent Van Gogh. Conservationist Mary Schafer of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas first spotted the insect body in Van Gogh's Olive Trees after examining a section of the work with a microscope. Judging from how deeply the creature was embedded in the layers of paint, Schafer concluded that the insect must…

Famed feminist art critic Linda Nochlin passed away on October 29th at the age of 86. Nochlin was known in particular for her 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” which had a large hand in opening the doors for contemporary art and artists to question the patriarchal personification of the artist as an aggressively macho, tortured man. In this Vulture article, fellow critic Jerry…

1) A Look at the Sacklers: Art Philanthropists and Opioid Manufacturers

A long read in the New Yorker about the Sackler family, who have helped build and fund some of the most well-known and beloved museums in the United States and around the world -- including the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and even the Louvre. The family have long been noted philanthropists, using their fortune to fund not only the arts, but various charities and…

A Russian performance artist was detained by French authorities after setting fire to a bank in Paris as part of an art piece. Pyotr Pavlensky, who achieved infamy in 2013 after nailing his scrotum to the paved ground of Moscow’s Red Square. Pavlensky was granted political asylum in France in May of this year. According to the artist, setting fire to an entrance to the Bank…

Last June, Mexico city played host to a life-sized, exacting replica of the Sistine Chapel. The project, a privately-funded venture dreamed up by Mexican entrepreneur Antonio Berumen, saw each of the Chapel’s intricate fresco paintings reproduced with photo-transfer techniques and installed on canvas inside a wooden replica of the church. The project was such a popular success that…

The firm responsible for funding the now infamous “Fearless Girl” statue on New York’s Wall Street has reached a settlement after being found to have underpaid hundreds of women and minority workers. State Street, a Boston-based financial firm, was audited in 2012, an examination which reportedly brought to light the company’s significant underpayment of black…